The fake news is focused on who said the word terrorism first, while using the dead guy as a football in a failed Pres. election attempt, according to Euro news reports.
They cited it as an example of how screwed up America is these days.
Thanks Iso and all.

NW... the thing about Cantor confirms one thing. The idea that they waited until after the election to break the news and spare Obama the emabarassment is bunk because Cantor certainly would have leaked it if he thought it would hurt the president.
In regards to your question. I really think the CIA must have been doing some extremely classified exercises involving captives. And the CIA was doing what it could to keep the thing quiet, and obviously it didnt work. Its the only explanantion I can think of. I dont think for a second that the US was negligent in protecting its consulate.

Negligence is knowing of a risk and doing nothing. Underestimating a risk is another matter entirely, and in Benghazi, pretty much all the professionals said that they underestimated the risk.

Bigotry, on the other hand, is holding a person of color to a more rigorous standard than a white person. What complaints did you make about Ronald Reagan when 241 people died in an attack on our barracks in Beirut? What complaints did you make when a soldier died in the April 5, 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco? http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0406c.asp

And then there is shrub. According to this site, there were 12 attacks on embassies during his tenure: http://www.usmessageboard.com/middle-east-general/246760-twelve-u-s-embassy-attacks-during-george-w-bush-administration.html. I didn't know that--but I did know that he ignored bin Laden despite the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993--he wasn't President. But he was president when the Cole was bombed in 2000. Up until that point, I think that we can consider both Reagan and Bush's failures underestimation rather than negligence. But after that? Negligence to close the door to your national security staff working on finding bin Laden. I had a friend who survived both WTC bombings. Bush was negligent. It might not have mattered, given the fact that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies weren't working together. That was incompetence. We didn't hear from you right wing chicken hawks when Bush said don't bother me any more about this guy that blew up a couple embassies, the WTC once, and the US Cole.

You haven't even bothered to read the statement of the Department of State's security expert, who said we never could have imagined this.

Yeah. I know John. The news is not accurate in the US media, because our news agencies are more like your high school paper.
We ask each other for the news, this is a tiny place.
He is not presently wanted for murder. He is a person of interest because he was in a fight with the neighbor over Johns annoying dogs. The neighbor paid the cops to search his house and the dogs were all poisoned while the cops were there on fri.
The neighbor was killed with a Luger like Johns. They are holding a suspect in jail.
Do you think a 1% guy stole the victims cell and laptop?
John told Wired mag that he buried himself in the sand with cardboard over his face to breathe while the cops searched his house and then fled.
Wired has been doing a special on John for Jan.
The victim is well known for bribing the cops to harass folks.
John is not helping by acting so paranoid and crazy. He uses a drug called khat, which is legal here. He thinks he can find a wonder drug from the extracts he made in his lab, but he takes way too much.
Too much local nookie also. He has stepped on the toes of more than one local policeman chasing the same tail.
That's another problem in a small place.

Washington -- So it turns out that the top brass at the CIA had an inbox of secrets of the all-too-human, sexual variety. Titillating, unquestionably. But what about the other secrets - the intelligence secrets that are the agency's reason for existence? How are they doing on this score?

When the uproar passes over the personal misjudgments of Gen. David Petraeus, the country will be left with this question of intelligence goals and missions. And here's where an overlooked problem of the Petraeus era should be fixed.

Petraeus was picked for the job, and eager to take it, partly because the White House believed that in an era of counterterrorism, the CIA's traditional mission of stealing secrets was morphing into a wider role that increasingly stressed paramilitary covert action. Petraeus, with his matchless experience in running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was seen as well suited to run an agency that combined the trench coat and the flak jacket.

But the Petraeus-era CIA had a hidden defect, which was that the paramilitary covert-action function was swallowing alive the old-fashioned intelligence-gathering side of the house. This actually seems to me to be one the central lessons of the disaster in Benghazi.

The CIA had a substantial base in Benghazi, with at least a half-dozen former military special forces assigned there. These were the muscle-bound security guys known to flippant earlier generations of CIA case officers as "knuckle-draggers."

They were in Benghazi in such numbers in part because the CIA was supporting the State Department's program to collect the shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles that had gone loose after the fall of Moammar Khadafy.

Given the large number of security personnel at the base in Benghazi, they implicitly took on responsibility for security at the smaller U.S. consulate a mile away. The consulate didn't have normal State Department security, so when the attack came on Sept. 11, the CIA base was the only 911 number to call. The agency's officers and contractors acted with great courage but they should never have been in such a position. Petraeus himself visited the Benghazi base about a week before he resigned, to bolster agency officers there and review what happened. His account will be important in understanding what went wrong.

Benghazi showed the reason the United States needs clandestine intelligence officers in dangerous countries such as Libya. They're in-country, under cover, to collect the secrets that will keep American citizens safe. That night, the United States needed to know what was going down in Benghazi, and in Cairo, Tunis and a half-dozen other capitals.

It's hard to do this intelligence collection - recruiting and running clandestine agents - when you're operating from a quasi-public base, as seems to have been the case in Benghazi, and is certainly true in many others parts of the world.

The CIA inevitably will continue to mount some paramilitary operations. America is still fighting a war against al Qaeda, and the CIA's Counterterrorism Center has become proficient in managing drone attacks, to the point that they've made assassination from 10,000 feet an almost addictive covert tool of policy.

And there's a role for paramilitary action in Syria, too, including an idea suggested to me by Hank Crumpton, a former top CIA officer who recently published a book called "The Art of Intelligence."

He suggests that the CIA train a team of Syrians that can hunt Iranian fighters from the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps who are working with Bashar al-Assad's regime. The United States has mounted similar clandestine training missions in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. I like this proposal because it underlines that this is a fight for Syrians, not Iranians or Americans.

But one resolution for the post-Petraeus CIA should be to put intelligence collection back in the driver's seat at the agency. And one more thought, sent by a wise reader who passed along this sobering quote from Karl von Clausewitz: "The higher the rank, the more necessary it is that boldness should be accompanied by a reflective mind ... for with increase in rank it becomes always a matter less of self-sacrifice and more a matter of the preservation of others, and the good of the whole."

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